Swap your face…really

Swap your face…really

Ever wish you looked like someone else? Maybe Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lawrence? Well, just get Brad or Jennifer in the same room with you, turn on the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor, and presto: you can swap your mug for theirs (and vice versa, of course). Don’t believe it? Then take a look at this cool video from Apache, in which two developers happily trade faces.

According to Adam Vahed, managing director at Apache, the ability of the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor and SDK to track multiple bodies was essential to this project, as the solution needed to track the head position of both users. In fact, Adam rates the ability to perform full-skeletal tracking of multiple bodies as the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor’s most exciting feature, observing that it “opens up so many possibilities for shared experiences and greater levels of game play in the experiences we create.”

Adam admits that the face swap demo was done mostly for fun. That said, he also notes that “the ability to identify and capture a person’s face in real time could be very useful for entertainment-based experiences—for instance, putting your face onto a 3D character that can be driven by your own movements.”

Adam also stressed the value of the higher definition color feed in the v2 sensor, noting that Apache’s developers directly manipulated this feed in the face swap demo in order to achieve the desired effect. He finds the new color feed provides the definition necessary for full-screen augmented-reality experiences, something that wasn’t possible with the original Kinect for Windows sensor.

Above all, Adam encourages other developers to dive in with the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor and SDK—to load the samples and play around with the capabilities. He adds that the forums are a great source of inspiration as well as information, and he advises developers “to take a look at what other people are doing and see if you can do something different or better—or both!”